REVIEW OF J. RAUCH'S GAY MARRIAGE: Phillip Munoz

[Not online yet; here are excerpts; for the whole thing, pick up the current issue of The American Enterprise. --Eve]

...The book's great virtue is its straightforwardness. Ranch's first chapter asks: What is marriage for--why does society privilege marriage legally? His threefold answer is: to provide a healthy environment for children, to settle the young (especially men), and to provide reliable caregivers (especially in the case of catastrophe). Ranch assumes such interests are severable--that is, raising children can be separated from marriage as a domesticating and care-giving institution. This allows him to leave children out of his definition of marriage: the legal recognition of two people's lifelong commitment to care for each other. ...The possibility of marriage would elevate gay men's expectations (Rauch says little about lesbians in this context) and open them to the idea that security, happiness, and health are found in stable, committed, life-long relationships.

Not only would gay marriage be good for gay men, Rauch maintains that it would be good for marriage itself. By adopting same-sex matrimony, society could normalize the expectation that all couples should marry, thus de-legitimizing cohabitation. We could uniformly adopt what Rauch designates "Rule 1 ": If you want the benefits of marriage, get married.

The obvious rejoinder is that it is not so clear that children can be removed from our core understanding of marriage without fundamentally undermining the institution. Marriage, no doubt, is in a state of crisis, but not primarily because couples are failing to marry, as Rauch suggests. The decline of marriage coincides with society's acceptance of the separation of sex from procreation, and marriage from parenthood. The former made sex before (and outside of) marriage easier; the latter made cohabitation and divorce tolerable. Marriage started to fall apart, in other words, when couples started to think it was primarily about personal commitment and mutual caregiving and stopped thinking about marriage in terms of duty and responsibility toward children.

posted by Eve at 4:04 AM | link

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